Pieces with Tales to Tell

The dealer in Islamic art Oliver Hoare is putting on a marvellously eclectic show of 250 objects, ranging from a Chinese winged rider in stone (5th-6th century AD), a marble emperor’s foot from the Roman empire, obsidian bell-stones from the Andes, erotic Japanese prints, a 1930s Italian baboon, Islamic manuscripts to Ottoman instruments. Most of the works are for sale at prices starting at about £500 to more than £1m, from May 6-June 26 at 33 Fitzroy Square in London. Hoare had a gallery in London in the 1980s and is well known for the swap he engineered in 1994 with Iran, when a 16th-century Persian manuscript, the famed “Houghton Shahnameh” was dramatically exchanged at Vienna airport for Willem de Kooning’s “Woman III” from the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.